After a nearly three-year battle, the Jolly Roger hotel in Fort Lauderdale was finally granted a historic designation by the city last week.
The hotel, now called the Sea Club Resort, belongs to Shimon Levy, who owns the hotel companies H.E.S. Hotels Corp. and All Sunny Hotels Inc. It has taken the Broward Trust for Historic Preservation and All Sunny Hotels Inc. years to come to an agreement about how much of the Jolly Roger should be preserved. Sea Club General Manager Michael Man wondered whether the hotel was worth preserving at all.
“The only thing historic about it is a bunch of people got drunk there,” Man told the Sun Sentinel in 2007.
“[The building’s] actual physical condition does not [matter] for historic designation,” said Merrilyn Rathbun, research director for the Fort Lauderdale Historic Society. “We look to see if it retains historic character and we thought [the hotel] did.”
After a lengthy period of meetings and inspections, Levy agreed to improve the original parts of the structure in compliance with the Broward Trust. There are yearly benchmarks scheduled to determine whether Levy is doing the necessary repairs.
Man supervised the first year of restoration. It included reinforcing the roof that covers the lobby — which was further damaged by Hurricane Wilma — replacing rotten beams and cracked windows, and fixing the cooling tower and chimney. Work was completed last year.
“The lobby was the only part declared historic, and every year we must do a certain percentage of restoring the building to what it used to be,” said Man of the 99-room hotel. “There is special architecture to restore.”
The hotel was built between 1952 and 1954 by well-known Miami architect M. Tony Sherman, who also designed the Yankee Clipper Hotel on Fort Lauderdale Beach and the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas.
The Jolly Roger received landmark status after meeting several qualifications by the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society including being an example of Mid-Century Modern architecture. Although there have been many changes in the 50 years since the hotel opened, it maintains a whimsical, pirate ship motif complete with a crow’s nest on the roof, port hole windows and the use of local coral rock throughout the structure.
